The growth of communication devices has never been as immense as the last couple of years. It is expected that within the upcoming years the total number of communication devices rise exponentially. These devices may operate in a variety of different telecommunication networks, and may support a multitude of applications and protocols. A party may, for example, own a Smartphone, a tablet PC, a notebook, etc. which enable that party to connect to these different types of networks. Additionally devices arranged to communicate to other devices without human intervention, typically denoted as Machine to Machine (M2M) communication, should also be enabled to connect to these different types of networks.
In particular, the upcoming markets for M2M devices, smartphones as well as tablet PC's contribute to the growth of telecommunication networks. These types of mobile communication devices enable parties to connect to different networks using one single device. A Smartphone, for example, may access various social media Internet sites, support SMS-messaging, voice services, data transfer, or GPS based applications and the like.
The different communication applications or services and telecommunications systems each have dedicated policies, protocols, rules and techniques for supporting communication between their subscribed parties. Accessing such different communication applications and telecommunications networks implies that a single communication device needs to apply such different kinds of protocols and rules.
Known systems like Voice over Internet Protocol, VoIP, gameserver providers, etc. keep a central registry where a subscriber of that particular system or network is registered. Such a registry is generally implemented in a central database, which contains subscriber profile data comprising, for example, personal information or preferences of a particular subscriber. The database is used by subscribers of the network to search for and select other subscribers in the same network for contacting.
Whenever a communication application, executed at a first device or user equipment of a communication network, intends to reach another communication application executed at a second device within the same network, contact details of that communication application can be retrieved from such central database. After receiving the requested contact details, the first device may apply the received contact details as to initialize a communication session to the second device using that particular communication application. However, if a specific communication application is not available at one of the devices, such a communication session can not be established.
New protocols and applications may require an update of existing or even the installation of new databases, which can also involve the implementation of authentication and/or authorization policies.
In such a connective environment, wherein different types of communication networks may be accessed by a variety of different communication devices with existing applications and new applications and services, one of the problems is to find out, in an efficient manner, how to contact another party in a communications network or system. In other words, a problem is how to retrieve communication details of another party, who is not necessarily a subscriber applying the same communication application within the same network, but can be a subscriber to another network or system, executing a different communication application, for example.
A further problem is to determine the required capabilities for successfully establishing a communication session between two parties, for example the type of protocol, authentication and/or authorization to be used for the communication session to be established.